In your Bb course Control Panel look for the Export Official Grades link. This plugin allows you to export a column of grades from a course site’s gradebook in a format that is suitable for uploading to STORM. For directions on how to use: http://blackboard.duke.edu/pdf/bb-export-gradebook.pdf
Just a few of the ways CIT will continue to work with Duke faculty teaching in the Link in the coming year:
1) Link Lunch – monthly CIT hosted lunch for faculty teaching in the Link
What teaching and learning activities work well in the Link spaces? What’s the best approach to using breakout spaces or whiteboards with your class? How do other faculty use the movable furniture in the Link? CIT will host a monthly lunch as an open forum for faculty teaching in the Link. Get together with other faculty for informal discussions about the Link.
Are you doing something innovative with the Link’s teaching spaces? CIT would like to profile you and your course (along with pictures and/or video of your class in action) on our website.
Faculty interested in working with CIT consultants to create a profile can email cit@duke.edu with ‘Flexible Learning Spaces Profiles‘ in the subject heading.
3) Consult with CIT at any time
CIT staff are available to consult with Link faculty at any time, to help plan for effective use of Link classrooms. Thinking about group activities in your class and want some planning advice? Wondering how your room could be configured to encourage student interaction? Interested in taking full advantage of the technology available in the Link, but not sure where to start? We can help with these and many other questions. Just email cit@duke.edu.
This semester, Duke opened a new flexible teaching and learning space in Perkins Library, called the Link. The Link supports student and faculty learning, teaching, and collaboration by offering several flexible, multimedia capable classrooms in addition to many informal meeting rooms and break-out spaces that encourage group and student engagement.
As part of what will hopefully become a continuing trend, CIT will begin posting faculty-written reflections of their experiences teaching in the Link. Following, is the second in a series of posts from Caroline Bruzelius, Anne M. Cogan Professor of Art and Art History. You can also read the first post by clicking here.
The imaginary cathedrals are fully underway. There are 12 groups of 3 students each, designing buildings that range in date from about 1200 to 1350. Our churches are “going up” all over Europe and even the Crusader Kingdoms of the Near East: France, England, Wales, Northern Germany, Spain, Turkey, Cyprus, and Italy. Each group has to come up with a fictional history, a design (ground-plan, elevation, section, and façade) of the cathedral, and the decorative program: stained glass windows and portal sculpture. They also have to produce a budget: sources of income as well as the expenses for labor and materials. Each group has to invent a story about the Christianization of the site (usually a Late Antique city), including the acquisition of relics, and they have to provide a schematic description of the relationship of their cathedral to the earlier churches at the site, as well as to the topography of the town they’re in. The students can either “recreate” the history of a real place (one group is doing Milan, another Compiègne), or invent an entirely new place. In every case, though, students have to use geological maps to identify accessible supplies of stone and wood, as well as the agricultural or commercial resources that are going to support the building of the cathedral. In order to participate in trade, the cathedrals have to be located on trade routes of major rivers.
(NOTE: The following is a 4 image slideshow which will work automatically – though you can click the image to cycle through the slides faster as well)
We’re now in the last critical weeks, because each project will be “performed” the week after Thanksgiving (Dec. 1-Dec 5: 10 minutes per project). We will award prizes in a “grand closing ceremony” on the last day of class, December 5.
What’s fun about this is that we’re inventing a fake Middle Ages, with stories of miracles, relic thefts, fires and earthquakes that destroyed earlier churches, popular uprisings against the clergy by townspeople, excessive taxation and other forms oppression of the lower classes by the extravagant bishops, all of which is going to end up, however, in wonderful and beautiful buildings. Just like the real Middle Ages.
This dance contest is open to anyone who has (or is pursuing) a Ph.D. in any scientific or science-related field. Want to enter? Make a video of your own Ph.D. dance and post the video on YouTube. Then, submit your information to the 2009 AAAS Science Dance Contest. Hurry, the deadline is November 16, 2008!
Duke has at least one contestant; Lekelia Jenkins recently completed her Ph.D. in the Nicholas School of the Environment. Here’s her video.
Dance video journal club, anyone? Or, maybe an undergraduate student contest in your course for best video dance explanation of a complex topic? Get inspired by watching the other contestants here.
Recreating historical sites can be done in many ways – structures or parts of cities have been constructed in programs such as Second Life and many other 3d programs. Now, Google Earth has released a new beta version of their interactive mapping and visualization software that includes a reconstruction of Rome, circa 320 A.D.
Ancient Rome 3D was created in conjunction with the Rome Reborn Project 2.0 at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. The virtual reconstruction includes major structures and even interiors for some buildings.
Ancient Rome 3D is available in Google Earth 4.3 (beta).
Julie and Vicki have published a research report on using audio feedback for peer review on student writing. They used iPods distributed as part of the Duke Digital Initiative, to test if audio feedback is an effective way for students to offer high-quality comments to each other on their writing. Their report “Can you hear us now?: A comparison of peer review quality when students give audio versus written feedback” (pdf) is published in the annual 2008 edition of The WAC Journal, a national peer-reviewed journal on writing across the curriculum.
Julie and Vicki noticed that when they gave students feedback on their writing, audio feedback was more time-efficient and seemed to be of higher quality than written comments. They designed a study to find out if students would experience the same efficiency and effectiveness using audio feedback for peer review. Students in their classes gave and received peer reviews using both audio and written comments. Students were surveyed about their preferences and perceptions at the end of the semester. In addition, Julie and Vicki assessed the quality of the peer reviews using defined criteria and two raters for each review.
They found that audio peer reviews contained more specific and higher order comments than written peer reviews. They conclude that audio feedback significantly improves the quality of peer reviews. The paper finishes with concrete suggestions based on their results and experiences with students for effectively using audio feedback in the classroom.
This paper is a great example of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning; Vicki and Julie have carefully researched “what works” in teaching using audio peer reviews, and offered suggestions for others based on their results.
CIT will celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, starting with a Fall Open House 2 – 4 pm Monday 12/08/2008 in the CIT lab, 024 Bostock Library. Faculty from across campus are invited to attend, meet CIT staff, tour the Link Teaching and Learning Center, and learn about new technologies for teaching at Duke.
Over the years, CIT has worked with hundreds of Duke faculty on projects large and small – some of these faculty will join us to describe how their teaching has changed over the years and what they hope the future will bring.
Technology demos and tours will occur throughout the 2 hours, and refreshments will be available with cake cutting at 3 pm. Registration is encouraged but not required (click here to register).
If you need a way to do quick and easy audio recording online, with a minimum of equipment and set-up, you need to try Wimba Voice. Wimba Voice provides a collection of tools which can be embedded in a web page or Blackboard page to allow voice recording and/or playback “on-the-fly” within that web page. Visitors to the page will see a toolbar allowing them to play back or record and save audio, without using a special application other than Wimba.
Use Wimba Voice to record and send voice emails, embed recorded messages in web pages, allow audio-based discussion boards, create presentations with audio accompanying visuals of webpages, hold simple audio-based chat sessions, and even create audio podcasts. These tools are available to Duke faculty using Blackboard, but are also available to faculty and staff outside of Blackboard – just contact CIT for an account on our Wimba Voice pilot server.
Connel Fullenkamp (Economics) teaches ECON 51D, “Economic Principles,” a very large class held in Griffith Theater in the Bryan Center. He uses a tablet PC so that he can sketch and create notes while he is lecturing. By creating lecture notes dynamically, he is able to quickly respond to student concerns and be interactive. After his lecture, students can download the notes as PDF documents from the Blackboard course site. In addition, both the notes and his lecture are saved using DukeCapture lecture capture system, which produces both streaming and downloadable files with audio and video for his students to review. Students can select the media that best suits their needs. Read our short profile of Connel Fullenkamp’s use of tablets in teaching for more.
OIT’s Training Group is currently piloting an online training program at Duke, to supplement the hands-on training offerings available on campus and to provide just-in-time learning opportunities on technical topics. Through OIT, Duke faculty, staff and students can “check out” a license to access thousands of tutorials available from the online training provider, Lynda.com. Alternatively, visit one of 8 workstations available across campus pre-configured for Lynda.com access.
Lynda.com provides multimedia tutorials on over 150 products from popular software vendors such as Adobe, Microsoft and Apple. The tutorials are provided in table-of-contents format so that users can jump in to the specific training topic needed, or start at the beginning and work their way through. If you want to learn how to work with some of the most popular and useful software applications available today, at your own pace, Lynda.com is for you.
To learn more about the training pilot, visit the link above. To reserve CIT’s Lynda.com workstation, fill out our application form.
Also remember that our Lynda.com workstation is just one of several multimedia-equipped stations in the CIT instructional technology lab, 024 Bostock Library, where faculty and academic support staff can create digital and multimedia materials for use in teaching. Basic projects, such as scanning or digitizing materials, can be accommodated on a drop-in basis during the lab open hours, or you may make an appointment or a reservation.
Just a few of the ways CIT will continue to work with Duke faculty teaching in the Link in the coming year:
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